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This month features an article by Steve about starting out on electric violin......
Electrifying Yourself!
This article is aimed at helping students answer the two main questions which I get asked about a lot - ‘what do I need?’ and ‘what can I play?’.....
What do I need?
So firstly - what do you need? In common with buying pretty well any instrument there is a wide range of choice and price. The question can be broken down into three basic areas - instrument, amplification and accessories.
The instrument: This is our basic first stop, but there are numerous options. Electric violins can have 4, 5, 6 or even 7 strings, plus there are bass violins which have strings an octave down. Initially at least, unless you have a specific aim in mind musically, I would ignore the bass violins and 6 and 7 stringers. The more strings you add the more the instrument becomes something other than a violin and is much more difficult to just pick up and play. I usually use a 5-string instrument, but if you want to go down this route do try out instruments as the spacing of the strings can vary quite a lot, which gives a very different feeling to the violin. It’s useful to have the extra range a low C string provides (plus you can joke about it to your viola playing friends!) but it can be awkward to play and if you’re using written parts it can be tricky to read a mixture of treble and alto clefs.
There are plenty of electric violins on the market and they often look fascinating - wonderful shapes and colours. Don’t let this influence you too much! First and foremost, in my opinion, go for an instrument that feels comfortable. This will allow you to play at your best. Beyond this it’s all about the quality of the sound, which is influenced by the design, but mostly by the pickup and electronics. It can be very hard at first to decide what sound is best, as the quality of amplification used also has a huge impact. At the end of the day, and particularly if this is your first electric instrument, I stand solidly beside the view that comfort is everything.
Budget will also doubtless be a consideration: With electric instruments it is not necessarily the case that you get what you pay for. Instruments can range from just a couple of hundred pounds to several thousand. I have had students who were completely happy with their Yamaha instruments, which are sturdily built and reasonably priced. At the top end of the budget range you can sometimes be paying too much just for the fancy design, or the name. I have played on several different instruments but have recently discovered my favourites so far, which are mid-priced (starting at under £1000) instruments from Bridge Instruments. These are beautifully crafted and sound superb!
Finally don’t forget that you can fairly easily amplify your normal acoustic violin using one of the wide range of standalone pickups available: This might well be a viable option for some players.
Handy hint: If you have a 5-string instrument and use a shoulder rest, it can make a big difference adjusting the height of the feet in order to angle the violin so as to allow you to get the strings positioned in the optimal way.
The Amplification: Apart from giving you the ability to practice without disturbing the neighbours, an electric violin is pretty useless without amplification! Unlike buying instruments, here it really is a case of you get what you pay for; and you can pay huge amounts if you want to! For the best sound at any price range you want an amp which is at least geared towards the right pitch range, so a good guitar amp will usually work well. Keyboard amps can also be reasonable. What you get will, to a large extent, depend on what you intend to use your new instrument for: Buying a full PA system, with power amp and large cabinet speakers might be great for big venues, but you won’t need it for home use or small spaces. Conversely a cheap guitar amp from your local music shop isn’t going to cut it for that big concert hall performance! Always try out amps before you buy, and go for the best you can afford. If you’re not sure how much power you’re going to need I would advise starting off with a decent portable guitar amp, such as the AER Compact 60. This will be fine for smaller venues, and don’t forget that many large venues will have a PA system you can plug in to. There’s one other consideration if you’re intending, as I do, to use a lot of loops: One violin line sounds great coming from a single sound source, such as a small amp, but once you build up a number of layers of looping (I have one piece which has over twenty loops in it) it can all get rather cluttered - and end up sounding unclear. I therefore mostly use two powered speakers in a stereo configuration so that I can pan the live and looped sounds to the left, right or centre as I wish. I also use a small amp for ‘foldback’ on stage - to make sure I can hear my own loops clearly, which is vital for timing!
Handy hint: If your instrument has a ‘volume’ control built in, get a reasonably high signal coming from that to your amp before just turning the amp up higher. Also beware of turning the bass end of your amp up too high as this often results in a lot of bow noise being picked up.
The Accessories: You can now make music (and quite loud music if you turn the amp up!) using your electric violin. For some this may well be enough: If you just need to add volume to your violin sound for use in a band or ensemble of some kind then you may well need to go no further. But most people will probably want to be able to do different things to the sound they are producing, and there are a huge number of device out there which will help you to do that! The possibilities are immense, and beyond the scope of this article, but here are a few pointers:
Stomp boxes and other standalone pedals - there is a wide range here aimed mostly at guitarists, with a budget to suit all pockets. A good delay pedal can lead to lots of creative possibilities, whilst distortion and filter type effects can be great fun and very useful in band situations. Try to find out what any guitarist friends use. though what works on a guitar often sounds very different on a violin!
Multi-effect units - some players prefer to use one multi-effect pedal rather than a number of single stomp boxes. There’s plenty of choice with good offerings from the likes of Boss, Roland, Line 6 and others. A cheap unit can be a good starting point to allow you to find what sort of effects you like and want to use in your playing, before upgrading to higher quality pedals.
Looping - there are some excellent standalone loop pedals if you want to explore this area of creativity. The Boss RC50 has a lot on offer, but you may also be able to get hold of the older RC20 models, which are a very good starting point for looping. Similarly the Boss DD20 Giga-delay pedal is a good entry level looper: The loop functions are fairly basic, but it has the advantage of also being an excellent delay pedal. I often use the Line 6 M13 Stompbox modeller, which is a multi-effects unit with looping functions - a good all round unit. there are lots of others on the market.....
Finally, of course, you can use a computer to generate effects: There can be some very steep learning curves here, but there is a lot of great music software around, much of which is open source.
What can I play?
So you’ve bought an instrument, setup your amplification and are surrounded by pedal boxes! What next?
This can sometimes be the point where it all goes wrong: You’ve played the instrument and messed around with the effects pedals, but once the novelty wears off what can you actually do with all this gear?
Hopefully you’ll have thought about this before parting with your hard-earned cash, and if you needed the electric violin for those blistering solos in your new rock band, or to cut through the texture in the folk band you’re in, and so on, then you probably already know where you want to go with it all musically: You just need to find the right sounds for your playing.
But what if all this was a bit of a spur of the moment thing: You love the idea of an electric instrument but you’re not sure what to really do with it......
My best advice here is to use your imagination: There’s very little repertoire specifically written for electric violin, though various people like myself are trying to address that! So get together with friends and try improvising together. Form the band or ensemble you’ve thought about but never got around to doing and write your own material. The violin is a tremendously versatile instrument, whether acoustic or electric, and will easily fit into pretty well every musical style.
And if you want to go it alone? Well, that’s basically what I did. I bought my first electric violin on a whim, and have spent the twelve or so years since trying out all sorts of music (not just on my own but also with all sorts of interesting musicians). I’ve gradually evolved the equipment I use from my first instrument hooked up to a second hand cheap PA system, to 5-string and bass electric violins, run through a laptop, and with currently (I just counted them!) fifty-one things I can press with my feet!
If you do electrify your playing I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I have done!